Love it or hate it, PowerPoint is an essential tool in the business user's arsenal. As with Word and Excel, PowerPoint is a large application. The focus with PowerPoint 2013 has been on streamlining real-world usage and getting the most out of the features that already exist, rather than cramming ever more functionality into a product that's already creaking at the seams.

As with all the Office 2013 applications, PowerPoint 2013 has been given a fresh coat of paint. It has a new icon and Metroesque look-and-feel, plus the application incorporates extensive cloud integration.

Start it up, and you'll be given a range of templates to choose from to create your new presentation. PowerPoint templates are nothing new. What is new is that they're now available with 16:9 aspect ratios, which the application defaults to.

Most of the changes in PowerPoint revolve around making things PowerPoint users already do a bit more straightforward. For example, Microsoft has found that PowerPoint users often use PowerPoint to make shapes and diagrams. While it could be argued that Visio is the better tool for this kind of task, the shape creation tools have nonetheless been extended to make it easier to create custom shapes by combining existing ones.

Similarly, PowerPoint users often want to make colors consistent between text and pictures, so there's now an eyedropper to allow colors to be picked up from pictures and used elsewhere.

To enhance consistency between slides, templates can specify guides along which page elements should be aligned. Templates can also specify preferred color schemes, so that anyone using the template will use the right colors and put objects in the right place.

Another common task made better is a new charting feature that allows Excel charts, graphs, and tables to be directly included in PowerPoint presentations without losing any functionality. In addition to better embedded charts, PowerPoint 2013 supports more video formats for embedded media, and it supports music playback that spans multiple slides (or even the entire presentation).

Collaborative tools have been enhanced across the entire Office 2013 suite, and PowerPoint hasn't been left out here, either. In PowerPoint 2010, comments on slides are little more than Post-it notes. In PowerPoint 2013, they're more capable, similar in concept to the comments found in Word, with comments presented alongside slides and users having the ability to add replies to comments.

These comments are cloud-integrated, too. You can click on someone's contact and start instant messaging them over Lync, or send them an e-mail.

Also in the cloud, PowerPoint can now grab pictures from Office.com, Facebook, Flickr, and other services. You can directly add images to a presentation from the Web without having to save them separately first.

Presenter view showing what's now and next, along with slide notes.

Finally, PowerPoint's presenter view has been prettied up and polished. Presenter view shows slides on one display, and information for the presenter (such as notes and upcoming slides) on another. It has been given two enhancements. The presenter can choose to zoom in on the display with the slide to focus the audience's attention on a particular part of the slide. He or she also has a new navigation grid to allow, for example, easy navigation to additional, optional slides included as an appendix without having to flick through all the slides to get there.

PowerPoint 2013 isn't going to change anyone's view of the application. It's still PowerPoint and it's still going to be used for bad presentations. While this perhaps isn't actually PowerPoint's fault, it can't avoid being tarnished by the way its users use it. Nonetheless, it's a stronger PowerPoint than before. The new and improved features, while only modest in scope, make it a better application.

Looking at the screenshots of the Powerpoint and other new Office products, I can say that I do not like the whitewash look that all the applications are now sporting. There's no contrast between the ribbon and the interface. At least with Office 2010 the ribbon was blue, so it stood out from something like a white word document or blank powerpoint.

Several items in this article point to 'features' that seem to already be in PowerPoint 2010 (and even 2007). Like being able to have color schemes saved with your templates.

As for the 'poor craftsmen blame their tools' argument, if you have great tools at your disposal (like many Adobe products), but are stuck using PowerPoint, you should complain. I can still make decent presentations, but I can't do simple things like kern type that a designer would want to do. I can make a decent presentation, but it's pretty difficult (and time consuming) to make an excellent presentation.

For me, the worst parts of PowerPoint have belonged to the animation features. They're just not smooth enough or professional enough.

Looking at the screenshots of the Powerpoint and other new Office products, I can say that I do not like the whitewash look that all the applications are now sporting. There's no contrast between the ribbon and the interface. At least with Office 2010 the ribbon was blue, so it stood out from something like a white word document or blank powerpoint.

This. These are AUGHOWIFHWOFUWAUGH MY EYES IT'S BLINDING

Send feedback via that little smiley face button in the top-right. Hopefully we can get colour schemes back in.

Wait what? Adobe? ADOBE? As an alternative to PP? Come on. PP is bad. But don't replace it with something worse.

Quote:

Why?

Because it is misused. Because it puts people to sleep. (PP contributed to the runaway success of Angry Birds because everyone in corporate America downloaded Angry Birds to play with in meetings....) Because the simplistic page and bullet list approach is not how one makes important presentations. Because PP presentations are so ubiquitous they, rather than the subject matter, have started to affect the very decision making process. Because it contributes to the already short attention spans. And so on.

Imagine if there were a pair of pliers on the market, but no one ever used them to pull nails? Everyone used them to hammer in nails? Maybe those pliers would be redesigned so they look a little bit less like a hammer and a little bit more like pliers?

Everywhere I look I see sales people and ad people and accountants, using PP in truly horrifying ways. Every conference I go to, and every meeting I'm invited to, the presenter fires up the projector and guess what comes up? Yep a bad PP. It is getting fricken old.

Of course I was joking about MS killing PP. It is so immensely popular for all the wrong reasons, it's going to be a perpetual cash cow for MS for many years to come. Unfortunately.

Ordinarily I hate comments about the number of stories on a given topic, but 8 stories on the front page about a single software suite is excessive, especially when most of them are entitled 'First look.' Wouldn't it have made sense to put most of them into one multi-page article? Surely the Office 2013 feature story would have been a good place to pull the articles together?

When the box that links to related stories can't contain all the stories written on that topic from the same day, then should be a clue that something's not right. At the risk of beng hypocritally redundant, one of the marks of good writing is economy with words, and similarly good editting is concise with articles.

In Microsoft's defense, it's not as if they invented the bullet point. They don't force you to use any particular element, and in fact give you dozens of free templates that may or may not use those elements you dislike at all. I maintain it's lack of public speaking ability in general. PowerPoint gives bad speakers the illusion of confidence because they think "Hey, if I can just stand here and read words, I can do public speaking". It's not different in concept than overhead projectors of old, the technology just enables it to a higher degree.

They do. They tell me that (some) engineers make terrible presenters. Someone, somewhere, had data that would have informed the analysis, but chose not to disclose it. That is a failure of integrity and/or management. I'm not seeing how it's a problem of Microsoft's.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't complain if they forced a mode that only allowed one slide, with the words "Listen to me, don't look up here". Half of using a tool effectively is knowing when not to use it.

Did they return the features they took away in the 2007 to 2010 transition? They stripped out a heck of a lot of stuff in moving to the new .pptx file format. They promised they would return in future iterations.

In particular is working save to HTML back? Or how about PowerPoint producer? The ability to script and record a video of you presentation?

I see terrible Excel and Word documents at work all the time, let alone bad ppt. Information analysis is one thing, and presenting it in a usable and understandable fashion is another. Those that are good at the former can, and often do, suck at the latter.

My personal gripe about Powerpoint is the templates are quite often butt-ugly, and the layouts seem to use font pitches large enough to be seen by the legally blind. Graph and chart building isn't so great either, unless that has changed in recent builds (it doesn't use Excel's graphing engine).

-Corporate standards in SharePoint or the Cloud - The standards could be used to start a presentation - The standards could process a presentation and make it conform to the standards - The standards are not just templates but active rules

- A goal driven interview process to develop a presentation - It would ask: Who is your audience? What type of presentation? What is the topic? Background Material - Based on this it would prepare a first draft with multiple sets of material for each slide

Taking these paths would make PowerPoint a compelling product that might address some of the concerns about boring presentations. It would not be easy to do this.

Say what you will about powerpoint, but some of the templates I've made that have been designed for primarily print look pretty good.

In the end, it's an easy way to get full excel charts and tables into something that you can actually control the layout with, opposed to from within excel which can be somewhat of a nightmare if you want your columns and rows to be of different widths/heights yet want to maintain some form of grid layout.

The 16:9 format for templates is long overdue... but I've yet to see a projector in that format outside a home theater. At a conference now, actually, and all the laptops are widescreen with 4:3 projectors. Fortunately, the presentations are still designed for 4:3 and just look stretched on the laptop which no one is paying attention to.

I'd like to know if Microsoft is including the ability to intelligently reformat presentations from one aspect ratio to the other. Ideally you could specify a primary aspect ratio and the file would be able to learn and save position/size tweaks you make for the other.

I have a feeling we're going to start seeing some awkwardly squished text/graphics for a couple years as 4:3 projectors try to make the 16:9 screen fit.

Ordinarily I hate comments about the number of stories on a given topic, but 8 stories on the front page about a single software suite is excessive, especially when most of them are entitled 'First look.' Wouldn't it have made sense to put most of them into one multi-page article? Surely the Office 2013 feature story would have been a good place to pull the articles together?

With one story per component we can have separate discussions on the different components. I prefer that over one discussion thread for the whole suite. After all it is the most used Office suit in the world by far and this is the first big update in three years.

Most of the problem with bad PowerPoint presentations is that the people designing them and delivering them have terrible presentation skills. It's not so much that the methods they use are wrong, just inappropriate for the audience and/or message. And these are the type of soft skills you can't automate with software.

I unfortunately have to do most of my job in PowerPoint, so I'm excited by a lot of these changes. The interface is ugly, but when has that ever not been the case? Overall, the changes look like they will mean I spend less time using PowerPoint, so I'm willing to look at an uglier interface if it means I don't have to look at it as long.

The Office webcast showed some nifty pen input, even collaborative ones. And using a tablet to point to things shown on the big screen like a laser pointer. Looked nice to me.

Edit: downside being we get even more presenters talking to their screens instead of the audience.

The problem with this is that almost nobody owns a tablet PC. Most people I work with don't want one, because they are heavier and usually smaller than other laptops. Not to mention more expensive, and all other things equal in corporate America, the cheaper option wins. I saw far more tablets in business school than I ever have in the real world.

If you answered, "office productivity app", you're wrong. The correct answer is, "relational database." If you need to move tons of dirt, you get a backhoe. If you need to store a ton of information, you *don't* create "digital paper," you create a heavy duty information store.

Microsoft Office is, in this analogy, like a robotic shovel on a segway. Sure, you don't have to break a sweat, but it's probably slower than an actual shovel. First you have to get the damned thing set up, then you have to have a perfectly clear surface to ride on, and once people notice how neat your digging is, they're going to want it to be perfectly square, and they're going to obsess over the tire tracks you left behind. What you really wanted to do was get that dirt out of there in a hurry.

Now, I get it, the digital paper is, presently, filling a need. But it is fundamentally insane, and we're stuck with it because so many people, including most software engineers, think visually and can't grok data.

Are we both talking about PowerPoint? Because what does PowerPoint have to do with raw data and the processing thereof? It's designed to facilitate images and brief amounts of text to convey ideas. SQL is that way <-----.

PP is is fine for the most part. You guys are just a bunch of elitist pricks. Not everyone can make a custom presentation with technical software. My gf has a PhD in Nursing, but she nor any of her students are IT wizards. They're not mean to be as most of you don't know anything about medicine and nursing.

PP also has the capacity to do many things, most of which are not just bullet points. Even then, if the speaker is good, it doesn't matter if the subject outline is outlined in bullet points.

Are we both talking about PowerPoint? Because what does PowerPoint have to do with raw data and the processing thereof? It's designed to facilitate images and brief amounts of text to convey ideas. SQL is that way <-----.

I was generalizing the digital paper concept. But, in fact, you're dead wrong. PowerPoint is used to create presentations, which are used as an aid to a narrative transfer of information. A PowerPoint presentation is little different, in terms of the method of transmitting information, than a Word document.

You are the perfect example of someone who doesn't grok data. You're thinking visually, of bullets and boxes and arrows, and you missed the actual data, the things people say at the meeting, entirely.

(And if you think people don't put large amounts of text in PowerPoint presentations, to include calendars and spreadsheets, you have never worked around the government.)

PP is is fine for the most part. You guys are just a bunch of elitist pricks.

Raise your hand if you have sat through hours of presentations where some dumb bastard tediously read one slide after another. I was in one where the guy even paused his monotone to wait for the animated transitions to complete.

We'll never get those hours of our lives back, and we have thus earned the right to hate PowerPoint.